Conquer Club

GaryDenton wrote:Too bad the Republican Party has gone mad and will do anything to discredit this record achievement.

GaryDenton wrote:Read more here:

https://simonwdc.substack.com/p/september-jobs-report-the-remarkable

(a) an internet rando with a substack, or,
(b) CNN, the AP, the Washington Post, and Politifact

Remarkably 47 million of those 49 million jobs were created under Democratic Presidents, 96% - essentially all of them."

GaryDenton wrote:So now you see CNN, AP, the WP, and Politifact as bearers of truth?
Doesn't that contradict your usual statements?
Not that I am surprised.

Inflation is out of control.

Inflation over the past year is now only 3.2% and unemployment remains a low 3.8%.

keyborn wrote:Too bad it takes two or three of those jobs to make ends meet in the present economy. I know multiple coworkers that have a night jobs to help pay their bills. Inflation is out of control.

GaryDenton wrote:

Inflation is out of control.

People should have better news sources.

Inflation over the past year is now only 3.2% and unemployment remains a low 3.8%.

keyborn wrote:

GaryDenton wrote:

Inflation is out of control.

People should have better news sources.

Inflation over the past year is now only 3.2% and unemployment remains a low 3.8%.

Average mortgage rates 30 year fixed- 2021 was 2.650%. Today - 7.18%.
Average national price of gas - January 2021 was $2.41. Today - $3.81.
Average price of a gallon of whole milk - 2021 was $3.55. Today - $4.31.

When it comes to food prices, milk is just one example of hundreds that could be used to compare recent inflationary trends over the past couple of years.

I didn't use a news source to find these numbers. Also, I don't use a news source when I gas up or go grocery shopping. What matters to most people and to me, is the bottom line at the checkout or at the gas pump.

keyborn wrote:Too bad it takes two or three of those jobs to make ends meet in the present economy. I know multiple coworkers that have a night jobs to help pay their bills.

xroads wrote:I dont think Biden could create anything. Just like McCarthy, he is an old puppet being manipulated by people behind the scenes.

xroads wrote:I dont think Biden could create anything. Just like McCarthy, he is an old puppet being manipulated by people behind the scenes.

I don’t think any President has a meaningful impact on job creation or the economy in the short term.

People who do are ignorant.

The Inflation Reduction Act is the centerpiece of Bidenomics, an approach that resurrects Democratic principles discarded in the Bill Clinton years, seemingly forever: old-school industrial policy centered on an activist state making a serious public investment in manufacturing; muscular regulation of corporations; and warm encouragement of unionized labor. (“When unions win, Americans across the board win,” says Biden.)(Edited to American English)

GaryDenton wrote:People working two jobs trying to make ends meet...

I think it really started in the 70s.

As a liberal, I blame Republicans of course. Mostly Reagan.

That is the easiest explanation of why wages flat-lined while productivity kept going up, income and wealth for the wealthy skyrocketed, and the share of taxes paid by the corporations and the wealthy went down.

Republicans are not for the working man or the middle class. Obviously.

They went to the culture wars to distract their voters from their policies. And the great pivot away from Civil Rights to get the White racist and Southern Democrats vote. And even Goldwater warned of them chasing the religious extremist fundamentalist vote.

What got me started on this is productivity and wage separation.

https://www.epi.org/productivity-pay-gap/
From 1979 to 2020, net productivity rose 61.8%, while the hourly pay of typical workers grew far slower—increasing only 17.5% over four decades (after adjusting for inflation).

But I am also still thinking of Robert Heinlein's Future History where a fundamentalist preacher turned politician became president. On our timeline, we got the conman businessman who only uses the fundamentalists for power.

"If This Goes On..." Revolt in 2100.

People working two jobs trying to make ends meet...

I think it really started in the 70s.

As a liberal, I blame Republicans of course. Mostly Reagan.
That is the easiest explanation…..

GaryDenton wrote:

I don’t think any President has a meaningful impact on job creation or the economy in the short term.

People who do are ignorant.

Biden barely managed to get this through over Republican opposition.

Investments in clean energy and climate since the Inflation Reduction Act was signed into law have created more than 170,000 jobs, and the law is projected to create more than 1.5 million additional jobs over the next decade according to estimates by outside groups.

https://www.fastcompany.com/90938486/inflation-reduction-act-bidens-land-mark-climate-bill

Previous economic research has pointed to two explanations for wage stagnation, especially among lower-paying jobs in the manufacturing sector: globalization has flooded the market with cheap goods from China and sapped domestic-manufacturing wages in the process; and technology has steadily ushered in more job-killing automation...

Wage growth has been slowing since the early 1970s, but “the competition with China starts somewhere in the 1990s, and the process of automation is a product of the last ten or fifteen years.”

“So many things have happened in the last 40 years—you have different policies, and the world is changing. But employer concentration seems to be an important factor,” he says. “It probably explains at least 30 percent of the fact that wages have not been increasing. And for economists, that’s a large amount of explanatory power.”

See that term “climate advocacy group”… not a “non-partisan research center”… this is called “propaganda”.

Starting in the late 1970s policymakers began dismantling all the policy bulwarks helping to ensure that typical workers’ wages grew with productivity. Excess unemployment was tolerated to keep any chance of inflation in check. Raises in the federal minimum wage became smaller and rarer. Labor law failed to keep pace with growing employer hostility toward unions. Tax rates on top incomes were lowered. And anti-worker deregulatory pushes—from the deregulation of the trucking and airline industries to the retreat of anti-trust policy to the dismantling of financial regulations and more—succeeded again and again.

In essence, policy choices made to suppress wage growth prevented potential pay growth fueled by rising productivity from translating into actual pay growth for most workers. The result of this policy shift was the sharp divergence between productivity and typical workers’ pay shown in the graph.

From 1979 to 2020, net productivity rose 61.8%, while the hourly pay of typical workers grew far slower—increasing only 17.5% over four decades (after adjusting for inflation).

A closer look at the trend lines reveals another important piece of information. After 1979, productivity grew at a significantly slower pace relative to previous decades. But because pay growth for typical workers decelerated even more markedly, a large wedge between productivity and pay emerged. The growing gap amid slowing productivity growth tells us that the same set of policies that suppressed pay growth for the vast majority of workers over the last 40 years were also associated with a slowdown in overall economic growth. In short, economic growth became both slower and more radically unequal.

If the fruits of economic growth are not going to workers, where are they going?

The growing wedge between productivity and typical workers’ pay is income going everywhere but the paychecks of the bottom 80% of workers. If it didn’t end up in paychecks of typical workers, where did all the income growth implied by the rising productivity line go? Two places, basically. It went into the salaries of highly paid corporate and professional employees. And it went into higher profits (i.e., toward returns to shareholders and other wealth owners). This concentration of wage income at the top (growing wage inequality) and the shift of income from labor overall and toward capital owners (the loss in labor’s share of income) are two of the key drivers of economic inequality overall since the late 1970s.

GaryDenton wrote:If I was a real hard-core liberal I probably should just post a union response to why wages have stagnated while productivity and CEO pay have greatly increased.

Instead, I will post something from a nonprofit non-partisan research institute that has been researching this.

Starting in the late 1970s policymakers began dismantling all the policy bulwarks helping to ensure that typical workers’ wages grew with productivity. Excess unemployment was tolerated to keep any chance of inflation in check. Raises in the federal minimum wage became smaller and rarer. Labor law failed to keep pace with growing employer hostility toward unions. Tax rates on top incomes were lowered. And anti-worker deregulatory pushes—from the deregulation of the trucking and airline industries to the retreat of anti-trust policy to the dismantling of financial regulations and more—succeeded again and again.

In essence, policy choices made to suppress wage growth prevented potential pay growth fueled by rising productivity from translating into actual pay growth for most workers. The result of this policy shift was the sharp divergence between productivity and typical workers’ pay shown in the graph.

From 1979 to 2020, net productivity rose 61.8%, while the hourly pay of typical workers grew far slower—increasing only 17.5% over four decades (after adjusting for inflation).

A closer look at the trend lines reveals another important piece of information. After 1979, productivity grew at a significantly slower pace relative to previous decades. But because pay growth for typical workers decelerated even more markedly, a large wedge between productivity and pay emerged. The growing gap amid slowing productivity growth tells us that the same set of policies that suppressed pay growth for the vast majority of workers over the last 40 years were also associated with a slowdown in overall economic growth. In short, economic growth became both slower and more radically unequal.

If the fruits of economic growth are not going to workers, where are they going?

The growing wedge between productivity and typical workers’ pay is income going everywhere but the paychecks of the bottom 80% of workers. If it didn’t end up in paychecks of typical workers, where did all the income growth implied by the rising productivity line go? Two places, basically. It went into the salaries of highly paid corporate and professional employees. And it went into higher profits (i.e., toward returns to shareholders and other wealth owners). This concentration of wage income at the top (growing wage inequality) and the shift of income from labor overall and toward capital owners (the loss in labor’s share of income) are two of the key drivers of economic inequality overall since the late 1970s.

https://www.epi.org/productivity-pay-gap/

- I can listen to criticism and change my educational sources.

Affiliated with the labor movement the EPI is usually described as presenting a left-leaning and pro-union viewpoint on public policy issues.

EPI is an independent, nonprofit think tank that researches the impact of economic trends and policies on working people in the United States. EPI’s research helps policymakers, opinion leaders, advocates, journalists, and the public understand the bread-and-butter issues affecting ordinary Americans.